Children seem to go one of two ways in responding to their parents’ eccentricities. A son might adopt his father’s love of sports cars, for instance, or he might turn the other way and start raising draft horses. Much of this happens without the parents’ knowing, simply by virtue of the child’s proximity to his mother and father and his tremendous impressionability. In other words, it is unavoidable. This is the sense one gets when listening to the music of the early twentieth-century American composer Charles Ives, so saturated is the music with influence of his father, George. Everything from the quintessential New England melodies to the strange compositional structures bears the paternal mark.
George Ives conducted two marching bands in Ives’s hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, and would often instruct the two bands to march toward each other from opposite sides of the town square while playing different pieces of music. Young Charles undoubtedly witnessed these cacophonic experiments, for his later compositions—both jokingly and seriously—often feature two overlapping melodies that seem at odds with each other. George also had a great love for New England, a love that is reflected in Charles’s repeated channeling of the region’s places and sounds in his compositions (most notably his famous Three Places in New England).
Many of Ives’s compositions have become hallmarks of the American musical canon. These include Three Places in New England, his Symphony No. 2, the string quartets, and the Concord Sonata for piano. But a new album released on the Naxos label for the 150th anniversary of Ives’s birth features a number of his smaller compositions, many for the first time. Ives was a lover of all things small, often writing short, comedic pieces that lasted no more than a few minutes. Thus, one could argue that an album of Ives’s miniature compositions is a more fitting tribute to him than, say, an album of his symphonies.
The album begins with Ives’s Four Ragtime Dances. The Orchestra New England, with Ives scholar James Sinclair conducting, does these pieces justice with its rollicking blend of ragtime, classical, and folk music. Like Mahler, Ives’s compositional mind was a sponge, soaking up every musical influence that he encountered (hence his use of hymns, military marches, dance tunes, gospel melodies, and more). That he attempted to write ragtime-influenced orchestral music is therefore no surprise.
The influence of George Ives’s “dueling bands” experiment is perhaps most strongly felt in “Skit for Danbury Fair,” a hilarious composition that seems to contain within its loosely defined walls the chaos of a small-town theater troupe rehearsing for an impromptu performance. One can also hear the seeds of ideas that Ives would later use in Three Places in New England. At one point, the music reaches what appears to be a harmonic resolution. But it falters at the last minute and stumbles over itself trying to complete the phrase, only to lurch into a brazen melody that descends quickly back into chaos. This sequence is almost identical to a sequence halfway through the second movement of Three Places in New England.
The album also features “Chromâtimelôdtune,” a bizarre experimental work that shows Ives at the outer edge of musical form. Other pieces, such as “An Old Song Deranged” and “The Pond,” are entirely tonal and harmonic. And the album ends with three Ives arrangements of pieces by Schubert and Schumann, all of which are delightfully tasteful and in keeping with the historic and stylistic parameters of the original works.
I came away from the album with the impression that Ives was more nuanced, more enigmatic, and less predictable than I had imagined. He was his own man, and his music displays a breadth, imagination, and skill that are hard to fathom. The fact that he composed as much music as he did—dozens of sonatas, multiple symphonies, and a seemingly endless catalogue of experimental works—while working full time as an insurance company executive is a testament to his love for American music and the process of composition. To be sure, I would not recommend this album to a first-time Ives listener. In that case, I’d recommend the symphonies, the violin sonatas, and Three Places in New England. But as a means of filling out the contours of Ives’s imagination and style, this album is a rewarding listen.